Reality Distortion Zone

Once
upon a time it was all so simple: Linux would take on and destroy the
Microsoft "evil empire" and liberate us all from crippling software
taxes.

However, the operating system's
success has earned a new class of corporate enemies - some of which
once were friends to the open source upstart. Sun Microsystems is undoubtedly more
threatened by open-source systems than perhaps any other major vendor
and has made clear its intention to give no quarter to leading
enterprise open source player Red Hat.

So, let me get this straight .... "Sun is undoubtedly more threatened
by open-source systems than perhaps any other major vendor?"

Fascinating.

Let's see ... just off the top of my head here: We ship two Linux distros. We do Jxta.
We do Grid. We do java.net.
We do NetBeans. We do OpenOffice.
We contribute to and ship GNOME and run it internally on
our systems (including my SunRay). We contribute to many
other open source projects, not to mention a bunch of global open standards bodies.
I've heard that SPARC is based on an open spec,
too. And although Sun's Java technology is not under an open source
license, it
sure as heck looks like an open community they are running over there
at the Java Community Process. And
didn't we do something with NFS a while back? Not sure. Oh,
and how could I forget ... doesn't the Sun Java Desktop System (JDS)
have some open source code in it? And I'm dying to see Project Looking Glass, which is
under the GPL, run as part of JDS in the future. Also, JDS runs on
Linux, which is open source, of course, and it runs on the Solaris
platform now, too. Which brings me to the biggest one of them all: OpenSolaris
... which is coming soon and will represent probably the largest
contribution of code to the community. Ever.

Yep. Sure seems to me like Sun is "more threatened by open-source
systems than perhaps any other major vendor." Scott may argue about that,
though. Just a hunch.

You are not a True Believer! Burn, heretic! -- Sorry, thought I was on /. for a moment. Really the problem is that people are conflating "Linux as a social movement" with "Red Hat, a vendor of Linux". Sun is not getting in the way of the social movement, but they have the right to target a competitor. RH has been very successful in presenting themselves as other than a moneymaking business (insert finance joke here).

Thanks, guys. That article really baked me. Huge FUD. And ignorance. Totally agree, Patrick. However, it's a tough sell. Some are starting to get it, though. That's why I think we need to respond to these articles immediately to correct the record. We've screwed up some stuff, true, but we also need to get our due credit as well. It's fun, too. :)